Of course, but acting on the suggestion leads to an unexpected behavior – I agree that it’s not a bug strictly, but it’s a feature that doesn’t work as expected with another feature. I am totally fine with it being low priority/never addressed, but wanted to document it for anyone else in a similar boat.
8 Likes
I agree with this, and as much as it’s my choice to not link them if I’m linking a term with many links (eg a missing common thread to many notes, which is a core purpose of this software) I’m either going to make mistakes or start clicking through them without examining the context. (said as a UX Engineer with 20 years of experience if that helps weigh my feedback)
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I have what is maybe a tough request here - in a page’s outgoing link’s tab, it would be nice if other pages were listed at-most-once. Once page A has an outgoing link to page B, all further unlinked mentions of A in B should be ignored.
For example, the following page is already linked to Database. I consider these duplicates and would rather the outgoing links tab say “0 unlinked”:
4 Likes
I actually rely on this duplication to help me create linkages between pages in different contexts; following your example, I might have three different pages with an alias of “database” (or notes with the same name in different folders I guess, although I don’t do that in my workflow) and depending on context on my note text I want to link to different external notes.
Saying that, I do strike a similar issue to what you’re talking about - I have notes that are reviewed and “finalised”, and I don’t want to link any of the remaining keywords or see them as “unlinked mentions” because I’ve already made the decision that I don’t want to link them. It would be good to choose an unlinked mention and mark it as “ignore” (Which is a manual per-mention version of your default per-note suggestion I guess)
1 Like
Suggesting “unlinked mentions” based on strings in URLs (including obsidian//...) creates a mess of junk recommended unlinked mentions.
I would like to hear one of the owners of Obsidian step in here to discuss this issue, rather than some random moderator telling us “we” are not going to consider the request.
7 Likes
Use case or problem
Currently Unlinked Mentions find references inside URLs. If accepted these changes would break the URL.
Proposed solution
Skip urls when searching for unlinked mentions
Current workaround (optional)
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Further to this - the current behaviour feels like a bug. It is too easy for unlinked mentions to break a link to an external source i.e. website or devonthink. One accidental click and a link is broken.
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For me still a pain point in Obsidian.
- Showing unlinked mention in URLS should not be shown. This is not an edge case. Nobody want to add links in an URL.
For the other problem areas like code blocks, perhaps give us the option to hide those Unlinked mentions.
Some of my notes show 20 unlinked mentions but they are all links in URL or code blocks. We should be able to hide those. So we only see relevant unlinked mentions in the future.
7 Likes
I’d like to add to the list of cases:
- matches within blockquotes, except if they are callouts, except if the callout is a QUOTE
Essentially I use plain blockquotes and QUOTE callouts to contain text that I didn’t author. And in my case, I don’t care to link what others may have said. I only care about linking my own thoughts and writings
Hello, I would like to add another use case where no filter on back-linking makes it unusable…
I use the tasks plugin to know when I checked a checkbox… It adds the date to the line.
Then, Obsidian tries to back-link every note that has this date in, which is not what I want…
Of course, I can dismiss that, but I get a huge list of those at the top and have to go through them all to get real good suggestions…
EDIT: This part seems to be solved in the smoking new release 
I have similar issues with Tags, I use them a lot and they show in the backlink suggestion… that is useless… I tagged the notes for search, not to back-link my tags!
The only thing this feature needs, is the ability to filter back-links with a Regex.
Is this doable, and where can it be suggested?
Example of the issue:
I disagree with this, some user may want to link those to their daily notes and see their tasks as backlinks to the respective daily note.
2 Likes
I reallyt think there is a usecase for ignoring URLs for unlinked mentions. I have a number of links that has words that matches notes. Meaning that I have to filter through the “unlinked mentions” to figure out what I actually want to fix.
I think it is VERY obvious that I do not want to add a note link within a link to an external site.
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That’s already in the list at the top. Or is your case different somehow?
I agree that we should leave to the user’s discretion what to link. Excluding unlinked mentions by some default rules may confuse users. But I also agree that too many useless unlinked mentions will prevent users from finding useful hints. So I think it would be a good idea to provide a way to manually exclude certain unlinked mention. For example, add an Exclude button next to Link button to exclude specify unlinked mention.
6 Likes
as a Software developer I’m really suffer from this when use unlinked mention, many of code blocks shows and i can’t even know if it’s a code block or not,
imagine you have more then 100 words all of theme in code block
This is a simple example of what I’m struggling with as I can’t tell if the word is inside a code block unless I click on show more context for each one of them
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I understand that you guys (the devs) want to leave this to user discretion as it is not possible to figure out what everyone wants and it might be difficult to decide whether or not something qualifies a valid suggestion or not.
However, as expressed in the first post and in many other answers in this thread, I think URLs are a no brainer. If a word that matches a link to a note is found within an URL, linking from it would defeat the purpose of having the URL in the note in the first place.
Why would anyone add an external URL into a note? Because they want to be able to link to somewhere outside Obsidian. Why would you link a portion of a URL to an internal note? It serves no purpose as adding it would break the single use case of adding an url to a note. If by mistake someone clicks to link the wrong suggestion (which is not that hard depending on the theme you are using) that original URL is not unusable as it is not even recognized as an external link and clicking it won’t take you out of Obsidian.
Can we please ignore, at least, URLs for the unlinked mentions suggestion? I love the unlinked mentions pane as it is one of the best ways of discovering connections but sometimes it is just unusable. I wanted to have a note for readwise where I add things I learn about it and have an overview of the notes I still need to process… try searching for mentions to Readwise in a vault full of readwise URLS…
5 Likes
A Use Case to some already mentioned topics with screenshots, to describe the issue from my point of view.
Use Case
- I prefer linking notes with other related notes.
- I love the linking feature from obsidian!
- I can find related topics really fast.
- I can generate new ideas based on my notes and especially by their relations.
- I use the “Unlinked Mentions Suggestion (Tab)” to link old & new notes for that.
The Annoying & Destructive Part
If you have a bigger list of suggestions, this is really time-consuming to evaluate and decide, what is relevant to a note and what might be a falsely suggestion based on a link/url (a markdown URL alias or a URL part of this markdown).
Destructive Usage
In the worst case, you click on the suggestion and destroy a working URL.
Worst Case Sample (Url/Path)
Worst Case Sample (Alias)
1 Like
I was just redirected here. I accidentally reposted this having made a feature request. Matches in URLs is a bug. If I accidentally make a change, the url is broken.
In the case of inside a [[Markdown Link]] - it would seem to break the link if allow to happen.
Consider making this an option?
1 Like
I have a related concern that I think might be safe to always ignore in the parser: I’m getting suggestions for linking notes in the language tag in a code block. Like so:
As others here, I happen to have a note named “Alloy”. This happens to me with “Dataview” too. In both of those cases, I don’t think there’s ever a reason to change the language tag to [[Alloy]] or [[dataview]].
2 Likes
In the original post of this thread, the item “Matches in substring of an alredy linked note” is struck out. Is this supposed to have been implemented somehow, or was it just ruled out as a suggestion?
Like @xavdid, I often I wish I wasn’t shown a bunch more unlinked mentions after linking the first mention on a page.
For my purposes, it would be help if there were simply an icon or flag added to pages under Unlinked Mentions that are also in Linked Mentions. Even better, list them in a third collapsible section – called “Additional Mentions” or similar.
1 Like